Serial Meditations, curated by Amy Brandt and Melissa Messina, opens at NURTUREart Gallery at 910 Grand Street in Williamsburg on March 28th; Featured Artists in the exhibition include: Ju Young, Ban, Judith Braun, Janice Caswell, Richard Garrison, Bridget Lewis, Rita MacDonald, David Pierce, Patrick Schmidt, Tina Schneider and Eliza Stamps.

The artists of Serial Meditations use the language of drawing and sculpture to investigate the meditative properties of repetition and seriality. It seeks to create a contemplative environment that offers the viewer insight into the intuitive and, at times, entrancing art-making process. Certain modes of contemporary art reflect the brackish, often confrontational character of commodity culture and our technocratic society. The artwork included in this exhibition stands in direct contrast to this stylistic choice, instead presenting a more serene, reflective aesthetic.

Like many minimalists, these artists recognize the strength and individuality of line. By focusing solely on non-representational sculpture and drawing, they show the ways in which the distinctiveness of a line remains a sustainable and valid artistic pursuit. The artists in Serial Meditations chart a larger philosophical process in their work, either intuitively or with careful planning, by repeating a simple gesture. In doing so, the work becomes a larger means of exploring the inner essence of existence. The repetitive line, whether drawn, fabricated, or sewn is used to reference larger concepts such as memory, growth and decay, and the multitude of small acts that encompass our daily existence. At the same time, the unique subtleties of each artist’s work offer a contemplative and often meditative experience for its viewer. The singular, repeated acts shown in the final outcome display each artist’s significant creative investment in the development and outcome of the piece, and simultaneously offer insight into the artist’s creative process.

The work in Serial Mediations develops from a highly personalized specificity to line on both a formal and symbolic level. Judith Braun’s collection of four drawings, display precise, controlled symmetry that channel the demanding aspects of daily life into a more serene expression of her own personal philosophy. The large-scale drawing by David Pierce of tiny cells intuitively and organically placed, creating a chart of concentration and thought. Ju Young Ban creates constellations of minuscule dots and connected lines in her transluscent scroll drawing that can be interpreted as mental mapping, tracking the movement of our consciousness. Similarly, the textile based work of Eliza Stamps uses stitching as a referential topography of memory, representing an intuitive reflection on her daily physical journeys. A personal iconography is also seen in the work of Tina Schneider, whose repetitive marks are not only additions but also subtractions to the drawing’s surface much in the way one can combine, recombine and omit thoughts and memories. Other artists use the repeated line to transgress the boundaries of two-dimensional aesthetics. Bridget Lewis and Janice Caswell use strings of glue, and wire and beads respectively to capture their individual expression in three-dimensions. Rita MacDonald and Patrick Schmidt create conscientious, thoughtful responses to the gallery’s architecture with site-specific installations, one on the ceiling’s sky light, the other on the floor. Comparatively, Richard Garrison’s Spirograph drawing emphasizes architectonic structure and solid form on the basis of his obsessive, hard-lined technique without actually being three-dimensional.

Serial Meditations activates the gallery space into an environment that emphasizes the line and its multifarious manifestations. It presents the concept of drawing as a metaphor for a more personal inner philosophy, and simultaneously references various types of meditation, artistic processes, and nods to phenomenology. Like the breath in meditation, the line is the basis for experiencing the exhibition.